The Face That Must Die Read Free Page A

course, especially in our pornography, where the use of school settings points up to the Sadean isolation of schools from outside intervention; clearly it appeals to something in the British.) I went into the Civil Service when I was sixteen, and floundered about for several years, trying to relate to people. Several characters in my stories show how I was: Vic and Kirk (both ironically named) in “The Cellars” and “Concussion”, Lindsay Rice in “The Scar”, Peter in “Napier Court”— Peter being how I became as I put myself together to my own satisfaction, if to nobody else’s. You can see what a loudmouth I was from my pontification in the fanzines.
    I was twenty when my mother decided I could be left alone while she went into hospital for the operation she should have had twenty years earlier, on her prolapsed womb. A neighbour of about her age, Miss Holme, took in my laundry, much to my embarrassment and resentment. Resentment and impatience and indifference were all I felt at the sight of my mother in a hospital bed, a well-nigh psychotic reaction I have never understood. I remember leaving one Sunday before visiting was over so as not to miss the pre-credit sequence of Modesty Blaise ; I remember telling my mother that I’d allowed a friend who was giving me a lift to come into the house while I put on my coat. She never forgave me or him for that, and took me to task for it for years.
    Her operation led to complications, and she was moved to a different hospital for further treatment. She believed she’d been misled about the operation and its aftermath, and refused to undergo a further operation to repair the damage. She left hospital as soon as she could, and tried to sue the surgeon, but couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case.
    When I suggested that the lawyers weren’t necessarily in league with the surgeon, she felt I had turned against her — that someone had got to me. I don’t know if that was the first time I tried to persuade her that things weren’t always as they seemed to her: that Liverpool wasn’t full of people conspiring against her, that radio programmes weren’t about her under an imperfectly disguised name. My denials seemed like betrayals to her, and she tried to find reasons why I was changing: I’d turned gay, I was taking drugs (which I wasn’t and hadn’t been), my friends were turning me against her. Sometimes I tried to argue her out of her paranoia, but it was fruitless: she would accuse me of trying to drive her into a hospital or a home, and make me swear never to have her put away. Increasingly, perhaps defensively, I accepted that this was simply the way she was and that I could do nothing.
    The house seemed much smaller. I went to the cinema a great deal by myself. Just as my mother avoided many local shops because she disliked the people there, so she ceased going to church on Sundays, but insisted I continue attending. I strolled to a church a couple of miles away, then turned round and came back, reading a book all the while.
    My fiction was becoming steadily more autobiographical. My invented town of Brichester, originally intended as the Severn Valley equivalent of Lovecraft’s Arkham, was Liverpool by now in all but name. I believe I was still avoiding using Liverpool itself because my mother had half-convinced me that offended Liverpudlians would hinder publication of anything they thought detrimental to the town. Writing “The Cellars” cured me of that nonsense — it was too good a setting to waste.
    I met Jenny Chandler at Eastercon in Oxford in 1969, after we’d met briefly at the previous year’s Eastercon in Buxton. In 1970 we bought a flat in Liverpool, and I moved away from home at last. That year my mother’s dog Wag, her pet for most of two decades, died. Soon Miss Holme brought her a dog which both women insisted was the same dog, having escaped the vet who’d pretended to put it down only to take it away for vivisection. I tried to